Target: Point Zero (30 page)

The scout car had reconnoitered the Dwina road all the way down to the approaches of Karachi itself and was returning to report back when its driver pulled up to the top of this hill for one last look-see.

No sooner had they stopped when they heard the ungodly screech coming from above them. It was dusk by now, but the golden sunlight, shining about two thousand feet above them, was enough to illuminate the long thin aircraft high overhead. They immediately shut off the scout vehicle, killing all its electronics and radar systems—the last thing they wanted to do was to present themselves as any kind of target.

They watched in fascination and growing concern as the big bomber began spiraling down towards them. At that moment, a large, fast-moving cloud that had been obscuring their view of the east suddenly cleared out. Now the crew of the scout car could see the awesome and strange mountain formation, too. They were stunned by the sight of it. All four men became very nervous, very quickly. They might be fierce warriors, but they were also very superstitious. Coming to a strange valley to make war was odd enough. Doing so in a place protected by the symbol of such a great creature—well, it got them thinking.

But even stranger, now this huge bomber was falling out of the sky in a manner they didn’t think was possible. As they stared, openmouthed, it swooped right over their heads, banked sharply to the left and somehow leveled out. All four caught a glimpse of the strange aircraft the bomber was carrying beneath its right wing. It looked like a biplane, but one without a propeller, an engine, an undercarriage or crew.

With growing astonishment now, the scout crew watched as the gigantic aircraft turned once again; it was so low now, it was below them. Its nose was pointing right towards the strange mountain. Suddenly they saw the muzzle of an enormous gun poke out of a cave located halfway up the mountain’s side, right where the mouth of the great creature was located. There was a tremendous roar. A stream of fire a quarter mile long came spewing out of the gun. Some kind of shell—it looked bigger than the scout car itself—went rocketing away from the mountain, just missing the oncoming, airplane and quickly disappearing over the southern horizon.

At that moment, the airplane’s engines emitted another terrifying screech. Each belched a storm of smoke and fire as the bomber was suddenly thrown ahead in a violent burst of thrust and power. An instant later, the small aircraft dropped off the bomber’s right wing and began gliding along, rising and falling, dipping and jinking in the high winds. It looked very unsteady, almost out of control—yet it flew right into the mouth of the cave. There was a brief moment when everything just seemed to stand still. Then a tremendous explosion shook the valley, the mountains, the air itself. The scout car began swaying in the shock wave. Even their emergency/low-battery powered systems began to blink off, the sudden turbulence was so powerful.

In a heartbeat, the monster mountain was swallowed up in a whirlwind of flame and smoke. A major avalanche rumbled down its south face; it gave the illusion that this great monster himself was shaking, mortally wounded.

The scout car crew was absolutely astonished. Somehow, someway, the pilot of the big bomber had been able to perfectly fling the smaller aircraft—which must have been full of explosives—right into the monster’s mouth. The one in a million shot had destroyed the huge gun inside, and presumably most of its crew as well. One moment, it was there—the next it was gone.

After releasing the glider-bomb, the bomber went nearly straight up the side of the burning mountain, its engines chorused in an even higher octave now. It reached a height of about seventy-five hundred feet and then it began to turn over again. This alone was a frightening sight for the men in the scout car. Whoever was flying this beast was handling it as if it were a fighter plane, not a huge bomber.

No one inside the recon vehicle wanted to see what this crazy pilot would do next. They quickly shut all their hatches, put on their helmets and jammed the vehicle in gear. With speed not recommended for such an expensive piece of machinery, the scout car flew off the hill and back onto the Dwina highway.

If they made it back to the main column, they all agreed, they would urge their commanders to call off this job and turn the Wazis back to where they came from.

If any of their superiors balked, they would tell them to go on up ahead, and look for the devastated mountain that once looked like a dinosaur and let them figure out how it suddenly got that way.

South China Sea

T
HE FOUR AIRPLANES APPEARED
out on the northern horizon two hours after sunset.

Two of them were F-20 Tigersharks of the Football City Air Force. The pair of high tech fighters were riding lead for the third aircraft, the C-5 turned flying radar station known as Black Eyes. The fourth aircraft, trailing about a half mile behind the C-5, was the RF-4X super-recon fighter owned by Captain Crunch of the Ace Wrecking Company.

The four airplanes were picked up by the small radar sets hidden on Tommy Island and tracked for the final twenty miles of their journey. Rising to meet the airplanes were the two Tornados of the small British force. Now riding shotgun for the small group, they escorted the visitors into the small island’s landing pattern, pulling away once the first plane began its final approach. Only then did the barely discernible lights illuminating Tommy Island’s single runway blink on.

The C-5 came in first. Tires screeching, its engines thrown suddenly into reverse, the huge radar ship floated down, coming to a stop in less than one thousand feet thanks to the trio of drag chutes deployed from its rear end.

The Tigersharks landed next. They, too, were able to shorten their roll with engine reverses and drag chutes. Coming in last for a slightly noisier, slightly longer landing was the venerable RF-4X. In all, the planes were down in less than forty-five seconds. All the lights went out on Tommy Island again.

The dark ground began moving. Figures dressed in black coveralls were running everywhere. Maintenance vehicles whose engines had been muffled down to nothing began wheeling around. A huge fuel truck was brought up into the night air, emerging from a large underground bunker located nearby. In seconds, a ghostly ground crew was swarming all over the new arrivals.

The fuel truck headed for the C-5 first. Using high-pressure pumps, it quickly gassed up the depleted tanks inside
Black Eyes.
The Tigersharks came next; they topped off both their internal and external drop tanks. Last came the RF-4X. Being older, it took longer for the fuel crew to do its work on her, the pressure pumps were turned down to half power, almost in tribute. Still, the Phantom was filled within ten minutes.

A troop truck appeared on the runway, it, too, materializing out of the underground bunker. Driving past the warming F-20s and the RF-4X, it stopped at the open-nose front door of the C-5. Eight men climbed off the troop truck—they were the Tommy Island communications unit—and onto the huge radar ship. No sooner were they aboard when the massive door closed again.

This done, the C-5’s engines suddenly roared to life. Already the F-20s were moving back out onto the runway. with a minimum of flare, they roared off into the early evening, quickly taking up stations high above the island.

Black Eyes
went off next. Its massive bulk rose slowly, majestically into the darkening sky. Once again, bringing up the rear, the X-Phantom was last. It quickly overtook the radar plane and slotted into its place at the head of the aerial column.

There was a brief series of radio checks and a moment of self-diagnosis. All four planes checked out okay. With that, a prearranged signal was given and each pilot reached over and turned off his main and secondary radio units.

This curtain of radio silence in place, the four airplanes turned to the east and streaked away, leaving behind Tommy Island, as dark and as quiet as before.

It was almost as if they’d never been there at all.

The An-124 Antonov Condor was still circling in its holding pattern just off the Filipino Palawan Passages when the F-20s arrived.

The Tigersharks’ sudden appearance startled the crew of the heavy-lift ship. One moment their radar screens had been clear; the next, the F-20s were rising out of the low clouds, their weapons systems turned on and maneuvering in a very aggressive manner.

The weary Condor crew stared with bleary eyes out at the spectral airplanes. Who were these guys? Friends or foes? It was hard to tell. The An-124 had been circling like this for nearly a full day now; buoyed by no less than ten aerial refuelings and a handful of radio messages from their Indonesian middleman telling them to hang on, promising triple and even quadruple-pay if they stayed at their position. Each time such a message arrived, the crew voted on whether to bag it or not. Each time, the lure of big money caused them to stay.

Now it appeared as if all that had been a huge mistake. Any chance that these two superfighters might be part of the same operation which brought the Condor here in the first place was dashed when the F-20s cranked up their air-to-air missile power and began painting the huge cargo plane. They were lining up the Condor for a spread of Sidewinder missiles. It was a deadly serious tactic used these days when one aircraft wanted another to open up its radio channels.

The Condor crew had no choice now but to click on their radio sets. The alternative was a long fiery plunge down into the dark, and heavily shark-infested waters below. No paycheck was worth that.

The F-20 pilots were already hailing the Condor, using a low-frequency, wide-band UHF channel that could only be picked up within one thousand feet of its intended receiver. When the Condor crew came on, the F-20 pilots made it brief: Follow us, quietly, or you’ll swim with the hammerheads. Again, the Condor crew had no choice but to comply.

So they finally broke their orbital pattern, the whole crew feeling dour and anxious as the airplane finally leveled off and began accelerating to higher than cruising speed. Reluctantly, it fell in between the two F-20s and all three streaked away to the west.

No sooner had they departed when the second half of the flight arrived: the C-5 radar ship and Crunch’s RF-4X. The big Galaxy quickly moved into precisely the same circular flight pattern previously flown by the Condor. The C-5 was just a few inches shorter, a few pounds lighter than the grand Condor. On a radar screen, they looked exactly the same.

Once in place, Crunch took his airplane up to thirty-nine angels, and snapped off a three hundred sixty-degree video sweep of the far horizons in every direction. Save for the F-20s and the escorted Condor moving off to the west, the sky was empty.

He sent a live feed from his camera down to
Black Eyes,
where its combined crew viewed it with relief and confidence. No one had seen the switch—this was very good. Even better, between the RF-4X riding sky-high and their own myriad of radar systems, they would be able to see anyone coming from many miles away.

Its own radios now set to the frequency formerly used by the Condor, the C-5 settled into the orbital pattern and reduced its speed to a slowish two hundred ten-knot cruise. High above, Crunch kept top guard.

Together, they would hold this position for the next ten hours.

Ben Wa and JT Toomey were there when the enormous Condor landed on Tommy Island.

Still under the protective eyes of its F-20 escorts, the huge Russian cargo plane bounced in, using the entire length of the substantial runway to come to a stop.

The big plane was surrounded by heavily armed Tommy troops as well as special ops teams from the United American Command even before it stopped rolling. Only then did the Condor crew see the five C-5s lined up in hidden shelters just off the runway. Each plane was painted in a different flashy color scheme; each one had a separate name and design. That’s when it dawned on the Condor crew that they’d been hijacked not by some rival mercenary group, but by the United Americans themselves. This deflated their morale even further. It was well known that the Americans didn’t make deals when it came to matters like this. They always played it straight and cool. Any last hope of the Condor crew buying their way out of this predicament had just gone up in smoke.

Ben and Toomey were the first people to climb aboard the Condor. The two American pilots casually climbed up the big plane’s service ladder and into the cockpit itself. They collected the crew’s personal weapons and their flight computer tapes. Then they called for a security detachment to come aboard and take the crew away.

They would be interrogated, the merc crew was told, and held “indefinitely.” The hired hands were further unnerved to hear the word “interrogation.” These days that could mean anything from a bright light in the eyes to mind-altering, brain-swelling truth drugs. But it was an unnecessary fear. There was no reason to work over the Condor crew; no reason to inflate their brains to get at some secret truth. Ben and JT could tell pretty much what the Condor was up to just by looking at it. The braces on its tops, the reinforced ribbing all throughout its vast cargo bay. It was obvious that the An-124 had been hired to lift something very heavy and deliver it to a spot very far away.

But what was the intended load? And where had the Condor crew been contracted to take it?

These things were not so obvious. But Toomey and Wa were hardly worried. They knew what their eyes could not tell them, the hard disks from the airplane’s flight computer certainly could.

They left the big plane by its rear door, meeting six of their UA colleagues. These were the members of NJ104, a former New Jersey National Guard combat engineering unit that had morphed into a special operations group extraordinaire. They had just taken delivery on their new C-5,
NJ104-II;
their first plane had been wrecked upon reaching Vietnam two months before. The new aircraft, painted in bold green camo, was a heavily armed airborne engineering station. These men—Geraci, DeLuso, McCaffery, Cerbasi, Palma, and Matus—were lugging components of the plane’s field metal stress test module with them. Using this device the engineers would be able to determine just how much weight the Condor had been configured to take, an important clue in determining just what it was up to.